1.1.2-Alexanderperchov
brick!club day two: name changes and lots of money boy howdy lots of money ok anyway you all know what happens in this chapter already, you all read it, so i’m skipping right to the things i wanted to highlight! i’m still working off a heavily annotated part, so i’m just pulling my annotations i’d already made, which is actually fun. i’ve got two things, both rather small, from this part i want to talk about first off, in listing the expenses, one in particular caught my eye: For the improvement of prisons, four hundred livres. For the relief and release of prisoners, five hundred livres. which is to say, our dear myriel budgets more for the prisoners than the prisons in simple terms, what i picked up was that while the prisons are paid to be improved, he pays and cares more for the men behind bars, and for getting them back out, and given relief, than he does for the bars themselves. in all aspects, he really is devoted to caring about people, and in this case in particular, i think it really sets the stage for the arrival of valjean, who, being an ex-con, who had been a prisoner in need of release and relief, which is precisely what the bishop gives him and then the second thing i picked up on was another of those tricksy reoccurring themes and mirror quotes (meaning: quotes that are sooo similar to quotes in other parts of the brick that i can’t believe the correlation is meaningless). today’s mirror quote is from the paragraph describing baptistine’s feelings towards her brother, the bishop. To this saintly woman, M. Myriel was at once her brother and her bishop, her companion by ties of blood, and her superior by ecclesiastical authority. She loved and venerated him unabashedly. the first underlined bit reminded me a lot of some stuff with valjean and cosette later, with cosette being valjean’s everything - something about him lacking any other love and so she fills it all, and he loves her with all the love he would have loved a mother, a sister, a daughter, even a nation. while here it says only brother and bishop, their relationship as it goes on shows myriel as also a sort of father figure to her in a lot of ways, and so on. the second underlined part, of course, as you have probably already noted, is a direct copy of a line from grantaire’s introduction re: enjolras how interesting to see those words here, so early in the book, that i had come to know so well from there, so much later in the book, and with characters that seem at first glance so incredibly different. i’m going to forgo any discussion on myriel’s name or how he has so much money though (seriously, what is a livre? how much is a livre?), because i see others have already gotten into that, and i’m sticking with this. so yeah, there’s my thoughts for the day. Commentary Alasse-irena Re: the Grantaire/Baptistine parallel. Wow, I had not noticed that. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. =)